Past felony convicts are eligible for 40% discount on state-regulated marijuana cards…
A marijuana dispensary in Michigan / IMAGE: WOOD TV8 via YouTube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) While Michigan‘s “non-essential” businesses are closed and many of the state’s residents are under house arrest, the state’s Marijuana Regulatory Agency has made it easier for “disproportionately impacted communities” and persons to access cannabis.
As part of the MRA’s “social equity program,” citizens in certain communities as well as former marijuana-related convicts will gain “increased benefits, further reduced fees and enhanced eligibility,” according to the bureaucracy’s press release.
The MRA will increase the number of disproportionately impacted communities from 41 to 184. The list seems to include most major cities and counties in the state, from Grand Rapids to Ann Arbor to Detroit.
These changes come as part of MRA’s mandate, under the Taxation of Marijuana Act, “to develop a plan to promote and encourage participation in the marijuana industry by people from communities that have been disproportionately impacted by marijuana prohibition and enforcement and to positively impact those communities.”
The MRA will encourage poorer communities and individuals to buy and use marijuana.
The agency currently considers communities in which convictions for marijuana, excluding convictions for distributing marijuana to minors, are higher than the state’s median average, and in which at least 30 percent of the population lives below the poverty level to be disproportionately impacted communities.
The MRA will lower the threshold to 20 percent of the population living in poverty on June 1.
Residents who have lived in a disproportionately affected community for at least five of the last 10 years will get 25 percent off their fees for a marijuana card.
Those convicted in the past of a marijuana-related misdemeanor will, likewise, get 25 percent off their fees. Those convicted of a marijuana-related felony will get the most benefit, however, with 40 percent off their fees.
‘The Committee’s impeachment investigation related to obstruction of justice pertaining to the Russia investigation is ongoing…’
Jerrold Nadler, flanked by Democrat members of the House Judiciary Committee / IMAGE: Washington Post via YouTube
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) House Democrats asked the Supreme Court on Monday to grant them confidential grand jury materials from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation so they can decide whether or not to impeach President Donald Trump again.
For months, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., has been trying to obtain the witness material, held by the Justice Department.
The DOJ has refused to grant Nadler’s committee permission, but the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in March that the House was permitted to access the Mueller files.
The DOJ appealed, and now the case is headed to the Supreme Court.
Democrats admitted in a court filing this week that the real reason Nadler’s committee wants the DOJ’s filings is to determine “whether to recommend new articles of impeachment” against Trump.
Mueller’s investigation determined there was no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia, rendering the original investigation moot by most standards.
Nonetheless, Nadler and his partisan cohorts have clung to the notion of charging the president on a technicality for refusing to cooperate fully with the two-year probe that occupied much of his first term.
“The Committee’s impeachment investigation related to obstruction of justice pertaining to the Russia investigation is ongoing,” the Democrats’ general counsel, Douglas Letter, wrote in the filing, according to CNN.
Attorney General William Barr ruled after receiving the Mueller Report that since the original charge was errantly—and perhaps unlawfully—predicated, a case for obstruction would be unwinnable.
As with the Ukraine ‘scandal,’ for which House Democrats earlier impeached Trump without citing any legal violations, it is widely believed that their campaign to put him on the offensive is aimed at deflecting their own liabilities.
A looming criminal investigation by DOJ special prosecutor John Durham has threatened to ensnare Trump’s political adversaries, including many top-level officials from the Obama administration.
Recently declassified documents have revealed that members of the intelligence community, Obama staffers and Democrats in Congress such as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., knowingly lied at various times about the presence of evidence that would link Trump to Russia.
This allowed them to spy on members of Trump’s 2016 campaign—and to continue wreaking havoc, both during the transition of power and early days Trump’s presidency, inflicting political damage that helped Democrats to reclaim the House in 2018.
That, in turn, fulfilled a vicious cycle by empowering them to wage even more specious accusations and politically motivated oversight investigations against the president.
“If this material reveals new evidence supporting the conclusion that President Trump committed impeachable offenses that are not covered by the [earlier] Articles adopted by the House, the Committee will proceed accordingly—including, if necessary, by considering whether to recommend new articles of impeachment,” Letter wrote in his recent filing.
The DOJ has asked the Supreme Court to block the Democrats’ latest request, arguing that once Congress gets its hands on confidential information, the “secrecy” of the material “will irrevocably be lost.”
But House Democrats are fighting the notion, claiming that they should be allowed to continue “without delay” their never-ending impeachment quest.
“This substantial delay,” Letter argued, “will seriously endanger the Committee’s ability to complete its impeachment investigation during the current Congress.”
Nadler has continuously insisted that his committee is “entitled” to the relevant grand jury materials, which were redacted from Mueller’s original report.
“The Committee remains committed to holding the President accountable to the rule of law and preventing improper interference in law enforcement investigations,” he said.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
‘Some people say that’s nice, and some people say I shouldn’t be doing that, but we’re going to do it if we see something wrong…’
Donald Trump / IMAGE: The Sun via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump warned governors during a conference call on Monday that the federal government might intervene if some chose to drag their feet on reopening for political reasons.
The call was part of a recently-launched series of weekly coronavirus check-ins with the governors, signaling a shift in focus away from the health crisis itself and geared more toward the recovery effort.
That includes the economic recovery after the pandemic response led to some of the greatest job losses in U.S. history following a period of equally unprecedented prosperity.
Since issuing federal guidelines during the coronavirus shutdown, Trump has taken a mostly hands-off approach in allowing the individual states to determine the scope and duration of the orders, presumably based on the risk level in their states, and how to implement them.
“The governors are making their decisions … and that’s the way I want it too,” Trump said during the Monday call, according to CBS News.
But increasingly—particularly among some of the more authoritarian, leftist governors—the restrictions have led to protests and other acts of civil disobedience from citizens and business owners who have been devastated financially.
Trump, who is engaged in his own funding standoff with some of the financially-strapped blue states, has speculated that Democrat governors might be politically motivated to extend the shutdowns in order to suppress the economy and sway the November election.
But he said he was ready to take federal action if necessary to ensure the return to normalcy.
“We will step in if we see something going wrong, or if we disagree,” he told the governors. “And some people say that’s nice, and some people say I shouldn’t be doing that, but we’re going to do it if we see something wrong.”
Despite the veiled warning, the president sought to strike a largely supportive and positive tone during the call, mainly emphasizing his eagerness to support during the reopening process.
“If you have any problem, let me know please, but it seems that the governors are largely happy,” he said. “And I think I can say extraordinarily happy with respect to what we’ve done.”
First Lady Melania Trump also joined in the call to promote her new “BeBest initiative, which focuses on “children’s emotional, social and physical health” as many face issues like anxiety and depression.
Trump has pushed for schools to reopen in the fall, with the disease having borne little observable impact on children. Most of the COVID-19 fatalities have occurred in nursing homes or under circumstances where age and pre-existing health conditions made patients more vulnerable.
‘I think that number is probably—in fact, I’m confident that number is an under-count…’
Gretchen Whitmer / IMAGE: WDIV via YouTube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) In nursing homes within three Detroit-area counties—Macomb, Oakland, and Wayne—29 percent of the Michigan‘s COVID-19 deaths occurred, WDIV reported.
These three counties, which include Detroit, report that 1,157 elderly patients have died in nursing homes due to the coronavirus.
Michigan has not accurately tracked COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes, as it reports about 700 deaths in the entire state, Michigan Rising Action reported in a press release.
“I do not stand behind that number as an accurate and full accounting of COVID related nursing home deaths, and I wouldn’t want us to present it that way,” said Robert Gordon, director of Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services.
“I think that number is probably—in fact, I’m confident that number is an under-count,” he said.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order that required nursing homes to accept elderly persons who have tested positive for COVID-19.
Last week, she extended the executive order, which places healthy patients with unhealthy patients. The order will expire this Wednesday if she does not renew it.
“We want to make sure that it is thoughtful, that it is informed by the best data that we have currently—and so that’s why it’s a shorter extension,” Whitmer said. “But we will continue.”
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the county’s reported numbers do not capture the full scope of COVID-19 nursing-home deaths.
Tony Hinojosa, 68, of Chesaning lived in a nursing home and died last Thursday after testing positive for COVID-19 two weeks ago but was not counted in officials numbers, WDIV reported. He had Parkinson’s disease.
Brenda Hinojosa, Tony’s widow, said Whitmer’s policy led to her husband’s death.
Republican Sen. Pete Lucido sent a letter to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and U.S. Attorney General William Barr calling on them to investigate Whitmer’s policy for potential crimes.
‘As an autocrat now runs the United States House of Representatives we can bid a mournful farewell to our constitutional republic…’
Nancy Pelosi / IMAGE: Face the Nation via YouTube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) The cost of a $3 trillion spending-spree proposed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to bolster her ideologically progressive agenda is enough to give sticker shock to many taxpayers.
But the hidden cost to democracy may be far greater, according to Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz.
In order to pass the so-called HEROES Act during the current health crisis, Pelosi implemented a rules changes that could fundamentally alter the operations of America’s representative goverment, Biggs wrote in an op-ed for the Daily Caller.
“It’s been a pretty busy week for the Speaker as she has remade Congress by shattering the great institution of constitutional representation, Congress while enslaving generations of future Americans,” Biggs wrote.
“And as an autocrat now runs the United States House of Representatives we can bid a mournful farewell to our constitutional republic,” he said.
Biggs said that the House recently authorized voting by proxy. That means members can show up to vote on behalf of themselves and up to 10 other representatives.
The House can now reach a quorum and pass legislation with only 22 members actually present.
Pelosi said votes will be conducted in this manner for the foreseeable future. Representatives will not be expected to show up to Congress for committee work, oversight, debate or voting.
Two unelected officials, the House physician and sergeant-at-arms, will have the authority to determine when the House can convene in person.
Biggs wrote that the rule changes will prevent representatives from debating, asking questions or offering amendments to legislation.
All these powers will belong solely to Pelosi.
The GOP-led Senate will continue to function as normal.
At the same time as Pelosi fundamentally changed House rules, she facilitated the passage of the HEROES Act on May 15 by a nearly party-line vote of 208-199, GovTrack reported.
Fourteen Democrats and one independent, Justin Amash of Michigan, opposed the bill.
One Republican, Rep. Peter King of New York, voted in favor of the bill.
Representatives did not have time to read the 1,800 page bill before the vote. Most were not involved in writing the legislation.
Senate Republicans have indicated that they will not pass the Heroes Act.
‘Contemporaneous visitor logs confirm that numerous Ukrainian officials were present at the White House on the day of the meeting…’
Jim Jordan / IMAGE: Fox News via Youtube
(Joshua Paladino, Liberty Headlines) Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said that documents he requested from the State Department will reveal a connection between the so-called whistleblower in President Donald Trump’s impeachment saga and the corruption in Ukraine that Trump initially sought to investigate, WND reported.
The allegations revolve around partisan CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella, who is presumed to have filed the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
Jordan said that State Department documents reveal that Ciaramella “also played a role in facilitating the Obama–Biden Administration’s interactions with the Ukrainian government relating to Burisma and Hunter Biden.”
Jordan—the ranking minority member of the House Judiciary Committee and head of the conservative Freedom Caucus—requested the documents last week.
He said that Ciaramella, while temporarily working for the National Security Council, hosted a meeting between Ukrainian prosecutors and White House officials.
They reportedly discussed concerns that Hunter Biden’s lucrative position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, would undermine Ukraine’s efforts to prosecute the company for corruption.
Jordan said “contemporaneous visitor logs confirm that numerous Ukrainian officials were present at the White House on the day of the meeting.”
Sometime after this conversation, then-Vice President Joe Biden engaged in a quid pro quo. He told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that he had to fire the top Ukranian prosecutor to receive $1 billion in loan guarantees from the United States.
Poroshenko obeyed and fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma.
Hunter Biden earned at least $3 million while serving on Burisma’s board for five years, from 2014 to 2019, despite having no prior experience in the natural gas industry or knowledge of Ukraine.
Jordan said the documents could help uncover “a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama Administration.”
Jordan’s request comes after a tranche of State Department files obtained by watchdog Citizens United via a Freedom of Information Act request showed that then-Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch likely had more knowledge of the Obama Administration’s pressure campaign than she revealed during her impeachment testimony.
The Senate has also promised to conduct an extensive oversight probe into the corruption, which may include subpoenaing Blue Star, the U.S.-based consulting firm that lobbied on Burisma’s behalf with the Obama State Department.
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Disgraced former Rep. Katie Hill, D-Calif., admitted she “cried for a few days” after Republican Mike Garcia won her seat in last week’s election.
Hill resigned last year after admitting to having inappropriate affairs with multiple congressional staffers.
In a Twitter thread, she claimed that she is taking “full responsibility” for her “mistakes,” but then blamed Republicans for bringing the scandal to light in the first place.
“This Republican win is no coincidence,” she said.
So yeah it really hurt to have my old seat flip back to Republican-for a ton of people & also for me. In fact, it was pretty fucking devastating. I went offline & cried for a few days but, as always, getting ready to stand back up & keep fighting. Hope you are too.
Garcia won California’s 25th district in last week’s special election, which is the first time in two decades that the GOP has flipped a district in the traditionally blue state. The election was supposed to be a toss-up, but Garcia ended up winning with a comfortable 12-point edge.
The GOP now holds just seven of California’s 53 House seats.
Hill had helped flip the 25th district in 2018, unseating its Republican incumbent. She apologized to “everyone Who worked so hard to flip this seat,” and vowed to help Democrats retake it in November.
To @christyforca25, @housedemocrats, #CA25, my former staff & everyone who worked so hard to flip this seat, I’m so sorry. I know I let you down, and I reflect on my role in it all everyday. Know that I’m here, ready to work. Let’s take this seat back in Nov – #CA25 deserves it
‘These are deaths that should not be politicized…’
Jared Polis / IMAGE: NBC News
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Colorado’s official death toll in the coronavirus pandemic dropped by nearly 300 after the state changed the way it counts COVID-19 fatalities.
The state’s original policy required health officials to count anyone who had COVID-19 at the time of death, even if coronavirus did not cause death.
This approach has been widely mocked and criticized by those skeptical of the fearmongering and over-hyping of misleading statistics during the pandemic.
Although some agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have encouraged the use of the more lax standard, hospitals have been accused of having a financial incentive with the federal government offering thousands of dollars per diagnosed patient to cover the COVID-19 treatments.
“We have been reporting … deaths among people who had COVID-19 at the time of death and the cause of that death may or may not have been COVID-19,” Dr. Eric France, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s chief medical officer, told KDVR-TV. “We started to hear stories about ‘are these correct or are these incorrect?’”
In one particularly egregious Colorado case that garnered national attention, the state health department classified a man’s cause of death as the virus even though the true cause was clearly alcohol poisoning, according to the National Review.
The 35-year-old man was found with a blood alcohol concentration at .55—a percentage nearly seven times the .08 level many jurisdictions consider to be intoxicated and nearly double what is considered to be a lethal concentration.
Now, the state is only counting those whose deaths were directly caused by the coronavirus. And as a result, the state’s total numbers dropped from 1,150 to 878.
The policy change is part of the state government’s efforts to remain “as transparent as possible,” said Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.
“The CDC criteria include anybody who has died with COVID-19, but what the people of Colorado and the people of the country want to know is how many people died of COVID-19,” Polis told Fox News on Sunday.
“One of the reasons we wanted to make sure we reported it out in a better way was to inspire confidence so that it wouldn’t be politicized,” he continued. “… These are deaths that should not be politicized.”
Polis has been one of the only Democratic officials eager to reopen his state. He rejected the idea that his state will need to stay shut down throughout the summer and into the fall, arguing that a prolonged shutdown of that nature simply is not sustainable.
But, Polis has continued to claim that even after the state reopens, life “will not return to normal” immediately.
I want to reiterate, the Safer-at-Home phase is not going back to life as normal. Here’s a look at what May will look like. #DoingMyPartCOpic.twitter.com/7ioVnopJv7
‘It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) President Donald Trump had one word in response to Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, after the RINO senator and failed presidential candidate expressed alarm about Trump’s lack of accountability.
Romney’s public rivalry with Trump has grown increasingly bitter since he became the only Republican in Congress who voted to convict the president during last February’s partisan impeachment effort.
After Trump announced the firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick—the fourth IG to receive his pink slip since the impeachment ended—Romney criticized the move on Saturday, claiming that such retributive action was a “threat to accountable democracy.”
The firings of multiple Inspectors General is unprecedented; doing so
without good cause chills the independence essential to their purpose. It is a threat to accountable democracy and a fissure in the constitutional balance of power.
— Senator Mitt Romney (@SenatorRomney) May 16, 2020
Trump’s decision to fire Linick was his latest in his series of efforts to clean out the Deep State.
The IG was said to be investigating whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo allowed a political appointee to perform personal favors for him.
Like recently fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who fielded the initial “whistleblower” complaint that triggered the Ukraine proceedings, Linick also played a central role in Democrats’ impeachment probe.
But Romney’s claim that Trump’s actions were “unprecedented” is misleading at best.
Former President Barack Obama fired Gerald Walpin, the then-inspector general of the Corporation for national and Community Service, back in 2009 after Walpin began investigating one of Obama’s prominent supporters.
The focus on clearing out Obama’s “resistance” holdovers within the bureaucracy comes as the Justice Department has turned its sight recently toward the potentially criminal conduct of several high-ranking Obama administration officials.
Recently declassified documents have shown that FBI officials attempted to set up former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and that many—including then Vice President Joe Biden—were allowed to unmask Flynn’s identity and gather crucial data from intelligence reports during the period between the November 2016 election and Trump’s January 2017 inauguration.
They abused these surveillance powers to launch a smear campaign against the incoming president and his advisers, which ultimately gave way to Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian collusion—despite the fact the the FBI knew early on that no such collusion existed.
The same leftists who pushed the Russia-gate hoax—helping Democrats to retake the House of Representatives in 2018—then promoted the Ukrainian scandal, which led to Congress’s failed impeachment probe.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
‘We don’t have to fear anything but fear. Wasn’t that an American who said that?…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) YouTube continues to censor videos that feature opinions and ideas about the coronavirus that contradict the federal government’s health guidelines.
Last week, the platform removed a viral video featuring Dr. Knut M. Wittkowski, the former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, because he questioned the benefits of social distancing.
In the video, which garnered more than 1.3 million views, Wittkowski argued that we should be allowed to develop “herd immunity” to COVID-19. If we do not, the coronavirus, which is nothing more than a “bad flu,” will continue to reappear, he said.
“With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity. About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won’t even have recognized that they were infected,” he explained in the video.
YouTube removed the video shortly thereafter without explaining why, Wittkowski told the New York Post.
“They don’t tell you. They just say it violates our community standards. There’s no explanation for what those standards are or what standards it violated,” he said.
In some cases, the site has gone so far as to claim that it is understaffed because of the pandemic, which has led to fewer human reviews, and that some content that does not violate community guidelines thus may be inadvertently removed.
It’s no coincidence, however, that YouTube nearly always tends to err on the side of suppressing conservative perspectives, such as lockdown skepticism, while promoting controversial and far more dangerous left-wing statements that have vastly overestimated the virus’s risk and threat.
This is just the latest example of YouTube removing content that goes against leftist dogma. In late April, the company similarly took down a viral video of two California doctors, both of whom worked on the state’s frontlines in its fight against COVID-19, urging government officials to begin reopening.
And earlier this month, YouTube claimed that Dr. Dr. Judy Mikovits, who raised serious questions about Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the members of President Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, violated its “Community Guidelines” by spreading “misinformation.”
While some of Mikovits’s conspiratorial anti-vaccination claims seemed hard to swallow from a scientific perspective, her 26-minute video was noteworthy simply because of her ability to create a viral discussion that used YouTube’s censorship policies against it to garner even more attention than it might have otherwise.
Yet, the questions she raised about Fauci’s role in the prior HIV crisis were consistent with criticisms he has faced, according to outlets like Newsweek and The Washington Post, over his advocacy of dangerous virus experiments—including the funding of research on coronavirus that relied on bat studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Facebook and Twitter have launched similar censorship crusades, alerting users when content posted to their website runs against health officials’ advice and providing relevant “fact checks” conducted by the mainstream media.
These actions are particularly troubling since tech companies are trying to have it both ways: they want to enjoy the benefits of private free speech while simultaneously removing content that doesn’t fit their narrative.
Wittkowski said YouTube’s restrictions won’t stop him from sharing his opinions.
“We don’t have to fear anything but fear,” he said. “Wasn’t that an American who said that?”
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
